Edith Pattou - East

The ending of East came together almost magically, like the final pieces of a difficult jigsaw puzzle. I had constructed the plot to take place in the 1500s, had located the castle in the mountain in France to which the white bear takes Rose, and had decided that the Troll Queen would substitute a shape-shifted troll to die in the place of a young prince of France one hundred years earlier. Though I was fully prepared to make up such a character, I thought it would be cool if by some chance there really was a French prince who died at a young age in that general time period. So I was looking through history books, and my eye was caught by a chance phrase in Barbara W. Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century referring to King Charles and Queen Isabeau's fifth child, a son born in 1392 who died at age nine. When I finally tracked down the name of this boy, it was Charles, which happens to be my husband's name. It was eerie the way it all came together, almost as if it was fated. But now I'm sounding like Rose's mother, and I can hear Rose's dad tell me it is all nonsense.

Edith Pattou is the author of Mrs. Spitzer's Garden, a picture book illustrated by Tricia Tusa, and two highly acclaimed teen fantasy novels, the first in the Songs of Eirren sequence: Hero's Song, an IRA Young Adults' Choice, and Fire Arrow, a Booklist Top Ten Fantasy Novel of the Year. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio, where she is hard at work on the third Eirren novel.